BOOK & BOOKLET REVIEWS
REVIEW
Body Life Skills Program – Book One
“ One Person not living their potential is a financial and social burden to society as a whole, before even considering the impact of their own quality of life! But how many people are living their full potential?”
Curtis, Tanya. 2017, Body Life Skills Book One, p9
I love this quote from the introduction of Book One, it is exposing of the true state of society and how we live in the world and yet the truth of it is also uplifting and inspiring. It is a pull up that gives direction and purpose. If it is the case that not living our potential is a burden upon the rest of the world, well I had better be living my true potential and that’s a fact. I flatly refuse to be a burden upon this world, and more, if I am living my potential then I am going to inspire others too. I see through the teachings presented in this book the responsibility for living my maximum potential and take this responsibility.
Key foundations of the book are:
- Everyone is already amazing just for being themselves
- Every behaviour happens for a reason
- Behaviour need not to be judged, rather understand
- Judgement hurts, it is damaging, we judge on what people do not who they are
- The BLS program relates to the BODY, to LIFE and to SKILLS we have to deal with them
- A key question is ‘I wonder why?’
- The central ethos is that this is not about broken people!
- Connect with people for who they are as people are not their labels or their behaviours
- That we can all self-master life and can use skills to do so, when we have learned the skills we learn further as we teach them to others
- BLS are about living what you teach, we have to live BLS to be able to teach it. What a wealth of understanding about behaviour! Tanya Curtis presents 16 guiding principles of the BLS work, with two key tools, the Behaviour/ Anxiety Scale and the I Choose Chart, all these tools are very powerful when applied to all our lives and can be life changing. I have found them evolutionary to use in my own life and draw on them again and again, for my personal use as well as with clients.
Using the Behaviour/ Anxiety Scale and the I Choose Chart have been pivotal in my development, they are simple to use and reveal so very much of what occurs in the body and with our behaviours and choices. The Book One of the Body Life Skills is a foundation of moving out of the groove we can get stuck in and to supports all of us.
~ Amanda, WA, Australia
REVIEW
The Poster Collection
The Poster Collection provides us with visual reminders of all that has been learned in the entire Body Life Skills Program and also as a stand-alone resource. As students and teachers of the Body Life Skills Program, this collection is hot property for use with people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds.
From the start, the fundamental acceptance of being confirmed takes us off the starting blocks. “I’m an awesome amazing and loveable being – just for being me,” and “You and I will always be awesome, amazing and loveable beings”, these stand alone as fundamental principles in all work with people of all ages and to support ourselves.
The Body Life Skills Program highlights the need to have strong foundations, illustrated in the poster which reminds us of “Foundations of lasting behaviour change.” As a basic principle, our foundations are so crucial, they have the potential to be the awareness, skills and understanding of what we stand and evolve from. If our foundation is rock solid, built with the substance of our willingness to learn, willingness to master our behaviours, willingness to learn decency, respect and so much more, we can feel such values are very ancient and wise for everyone. We can stay steady when the challenges come, learn more and stay open to learning. That is the life-long process of being a student of life and of self-mastery.
The concept of The Classroom of Life supports us in this process. Life can tell us that there is always somewhere we need to try to get to, things we are try to achieve, we are never ‘there’, but always trying to get ‘there’, wherever this fictitious ‘there’ is. With the ‘awesome amazing and loveable being’s we are, there is no ‘there’ to get to, nothing to drive ourselves to strive for that is always stay out of reach. In ‘The Classroom of Life’ we learn or don’t learn, yet always CAN learn at every turn. We always have the chance to choose.
The poster collection is not just for us as students of this course, but also for everyone of us. This collection helps to support us to take the skills we learned in the Body Life Skills Program, and literally walk them out the door into the rest of our lives. In this way we live the Body Life Skills Program in the home, the workplace, the supermarket, at the dentist, in our relationships, everywhere. That is a resource very well worth investing in.
~ Amanda, WA, Australia
REVIEW
The 'I Choose Chart' Collection
The I Choose Charts can be applied to every part of life. They are something that requires an openness and willingness to learn from. They can be sobering and also very joyful and playful and it is this attitude of playfulness that is useful to hold, for intensity and emphasis are not useful members of this celebration party, instead cause us to get bogged down in everything that is not who we are. I frequently feel like a dog wagging its tail after making all the discoveries that I have made as I use the charts. We can be our own sleuth, our own detective and our own scientist of the behaviour we exhibit, and I love that.
The I Choose Chart Collection helps us learn how to use the charts to change behaviour and so change lives, every detail is covered in the 36 detailed examples. It is, in completing the charts, when our own challenges come up in full view. It is in this process that we really learn the use of the chart. Each I Choose Chart plots the details of our path to code blue and steadiness, AND our possible choices to move to code red. In every circumstance, for example, when something hurts us, when we find something difficult, when we are corrected, when we think people are laughing at us, and the gift in these charts takes us all the way through to when we are taking responsibility, looking at self-love, that is when the I Choose Charts excel.
The reason for the supportive nature of the charts is because they can expose and lay bare all our choices. What we are living is in our face, visible and often very disharmonious. But how great it is to choose differently to the behaviour that has gripped us for so long. For example, Poster 16 is a very strong representation of maximisation. It looks at what happens when we think about the future. The reactions from the old skills and behaviours are certainly what I have lived in the past. Which it was so humbling to read the responses from the new skills section, where there is nothing but a choosing to see all that is grand about right now, including looking at our part and our responsibility.
What a liberation it is to choose differently and what a humbleness is on offer. To read this I Choose Chart Collection cannot but bring us to humbleness, at every turn to see just how far we have come is immense. This stopped me constantly in my tracks, asking me to feel my own responses. The I Choose Charts are the antithesis to the falsity of expectation. All the reactions and choices that take us to code red are moved and layered by expectation and it’s kind that have tied us up into knots end over end. The blue simply returns us to responsibility.
Thank God for Tanya Curtis choosing Code Blue, she has made this I Choose Collection accessible for the whole world to come to its knees in humbleness – with no drama but the deepest love.
~ Amanda, WA, Australia
